Most wrestlers spend years creating one memorable character. Joe Rage has built two. Rage is an old-school throwback inspired by 1980s wrestling, whereas Erin Jacobs, is a blood-soaked psychopath influenced by an iconic horror movie.
Like many forms of entertainment, sometimes a character doesn’t quite fit in with what is being presented to the audience. With this in mind, the more wrestling-based promotions will often see Joe Rage compete, whereas those looking for more character-based work will see Erin Jacobs walk to the ring.
Speaking with Features of Wrestling, Rage explained how the first persona came to life:
“The name Joe Rage was given to me by Chris, because Chris Diamond, he had been Chris Rage at one point, and it was a coincidence that I’d always call myself Joe Rage on SmackDown games and stuff like that. I think it was like a pre-selected name, I just gave myself it and kept it all the way through the games. Then Chris gave me that. So I took it, ran with it, then it became like this traditional wrestler sort of thing. I always look at it as it’s a bit of a look to the past, look to 80s style wrestling, 80s style look. I try and incorporate as many 80s references or gaming or something like that into that look as much as I can. Then just recently I’ve flipped things over to a more sort of like rogue and wasteland-ish look.”
Depending on the promotion, fans could get to see Joe Rage live, or his darker persona, Erin Jacobs.
Creating Erin Jacobs After Being “Sting”
Newcastle-based North Wrestling’s pitch for a darker presentation appealed to Rage immediately. Rather than sticking to what he had been doing before, he wanted something unsettling that would feel completely different from Joe Rage.
“North came up with Erin Jacobs. [Andrew] Bowers saw me at Absolute Wrestling, he liked the way that I worked. He said, ‘I think have something for [you], but hear me out with the gimmick, because it’s a position I want to give you. The jumping off point is American Psycho, you can come up with the rest, but that’s what I want for you, is that this quiet psycho that we can kind of work with.’ I got to thinking about it and I was like, I don’t know which way I can go with this, because it looks like a bit of an opportunity, because I’d seen North’s aesthetic, I really liked it and I wanted to indulge myself into that really creatively.”
Making his debut as Jacobs against Amir Jordan in North Wrestling, Rage also credited Jordan for his part in making his new persona as frightening as possible. While the American Psycho inspiration was the starting point, Rage was keen to avoid creating a direct Patrick Bateman imitation. Instead, the character gradually evolved through presentation changes:
“We started adding the gloves and added trousers rather than just pants, because I think there was somebody in the crowd on the first match who said, ‘Oh look, it’s Joe Rage in black pants.’ We were like, all right, that’s too much like Joe Rage, so pull it away a little bit. I think we did that quite effectively.”
Over time, Erin Jacobs evolved from an unsettling quiet figure into something far more disturbing, with fake blood covering his face before he even steps through the curtain. Rage credits his time in BWR with the character making it to the next level:
“All of the blood started coming in because I was at BWR. I was like well this is like a different Erin, so I want to put another layer onto it. I had seen people starting to do Patrick Bateman-esque tributes in their own characters in other places, like Dexter Lumis and you had other people in the indies that were all doing similar stuff. So I just thought I’ll take a scene out of American Psycho. It was the scene where he’s chasing off the girls with a chainsaw and just covered head to toe in blood. I was like, I want that; if I just cover myself in like fake blood and just go out there, that’s another weird layer that I can put on.”
Multiple personas have existed in wrestling for decades, from Mick Foley’s Cactus Jack, Dude Love and Mankind to Finn Bálor’s Demon. Rage believes Joe Rage and Erin Jacobs could one day both make an appearance on the same show. Rage also joked that he would love to repeat the Foley spot from 1998, which saw The Hardcore Legend enter the Royal Rumble match three times.
Even though wrestling fans see him as either Joe Rage or Erin Jacobs, there was a time when his persona was a tribute to one of the greatest wrestlers of all time. For a number of years, if fans saw a wrestler portraying wrestling icon Sting at a UK show, Joe Rage could have been the man behind the face paint:
“So I was the UK Sting for a long time.” The idea was given to him after being told backstage that he looked like Steve Borden. Not aware that was Sting’s shoot name, Rage went on to source the gear and paint to look like the Hall of Famer:
“I went to the effort of going to a seamstress, who knew nothing about wrestling, showing them the pictures and saying, ‘This is what he wears.’ They go, ‘We’ve never done singlets before, but we’ll try and piece it together.’ Then I go and scour the internet, trying to find out what face paint he used to wear. I found this French company called Meron. At the time I had to import it from France and I used to get the white and black. I got red just in case, never ended up using it. I did want to end up looking like Darth Maul. I started putting all the face paint on, it was a long trial and error. When I was at home, putting it on, taking it off, putting it on again, trying to make it so I can do it just like freehand.”
Showing up to a future show in the face paint, the promoter who originally told him he looked like Sting was confused. While it may have been a joke on the future Joe Rage, he did wrestle as the UK Sting for around three years.
Influences And Life-Long Mentors
A fan of wrestling since childhood, Paul Orndorff was an early influence on Rage due to his physical style. However, also liking more character-based personas, Rage found himself gravitating to Goldust for one reason in particular:
“Because when I was a kid, seeing somebody use a finisher of just kicking somebody in the balls, I was just like that’s the best finisher, no one can beat that,” quipped Rage.
Looking to follow in the footsteps of his heroes, Rage did what many have done and enrolled in a local wrestling school. However, his earlier matches made him almost want to quit there and then:
“So there was a series of matches where I used to get dropped on my head over and over and over again. I don’t know whether he was maybe angry with me being a new wrestler coming in, feeling I could take a spot or something like that. One time I’m on my way back with Chris, and then we get to the point of dropping Daz off. Daz closes the door and then I just let out this anger of ‘Why does this guy keep dropping me on my head all the time?!’ Then Chris is dying laughing. He goes, ‘You can’t let him do that. You’re supposed to give him a receipt.’ I thought there was a hierarchy to wrestling and Chris is saying, ‘Yeah, there is, until somebody drops you on your head and you need to do something about it.’ So, okay, fine.
The next time I start wrestling with him, which turned out to be a couple of years later, I get my opportunity to give him something. I give him a splash and go in and put all of my body into it. At the time I was 15 stone, so I could just give him 15 stone straight to the head. Afterwards he goes, ‘I don’t want to be working with him anymore. He’s a stiff bastard.’ Ian McGregor at the time goes, ‘You’re one to f*cking talk,’ and just leaves it as that.”
Also during this pivotal stage of his career, Rage was mentored by Rampage Brown and Thom Latimer, better known to fans as Bram.
“They were everything to me, because when me and Thom first met, he was still in TNA. We hit it off like house on fire straight away. We were just talking about music, films and things like that. We were on the road together, he was taking me under his wing, he was really sort of like letting me know how I can get better in sort of the little ways and the psychology ways and really sort of like getting my conditioning better.
He was making sure that he held me in high regard. I’d never had that, I never had that kind of acknowledgement and appreciation. So, getting that respect from somebody that I already admired was massive to me.
Then with Rampage, he is kind of this wise, you know, not really that much older guy. He’s kind of like a father figure to me. He’s not that much older than me, but he looks out for me quite a lot, and he makes sure that I’m doing like the right thing and going the right path and stuff all the time.”
Rage was asked by Rampage if he was interested in being one of the students for his school. Even though Rage accepted the opportunity, the longevity was not a guarantee. With approximately 30 places, those who were not doing the work could have been cut:
“When Rampage was opening the school, he was on the show for Chris, and he had said to me, ‘What are you doing on Wednesdays? I’m going to be opening school, and I think you should come.’ Because at the time when he opened that school, he was selecting his students, because I think he could kind of command that a little bit more, and there was really sort of strict rules with it. You had to be in a certain condition, and you had to make sure that you were sticking to a regimen; you actually were doing the work outside of the ring to come into the ring and learn off him.
There were cutoffs sometimes and there would be some people that would be cut because they only wanted to teach about 30 people. They were getting above 35 all the time, so people would be cut if they’re not meeting the standard. So it was a real honour to be taught at the times that I was, because when I was taught by Chris, it was a more intense time for him when he was teaching. When I was taught by Thom, it was a more intense time for him teaching, and I got that closeness with him to be on the road with him.”
Despite the intensity, Rage feels honoured to be a part of that era of pro wrestling training in the North East:
“It was an honour to be part of the beginning of Rampage’s training as well, because again it was more intense. Not saying that they’ve all lapsed off or anything, but it’s just things where I think over time, comfortability starts to set in certain places and people sometimes don’t want to train as intensely as what we did. I think they were a bit ruthless with training, but in a good way, they wanted to kind of mimic a little bit of Bill Demott’s kind of training, because that’s what Rampage had been through and what Thom had been through. They were trying to teach those kind of things to us and to me to sort of make it so that we could withstand anything, and that we were going to be the guys to kind of change the North East scene, because at the time it wasn’t really the best standard around most places. I believe that we did that at that time. I think that there are some standouts there. When you look at people like Rory Coyle Howard Drake, and to some degree, myself and Benji. There’s a lot of names that you can kind of pull out with that team, where you can sort of say, like, we set a good standard for North East wrestling.”
Fight Factory Wrestling & A Scary Spot
Booked to be a part of the Lincoln promotion, Rage’s first match was with Hayden “Dutch” Loeve. Believing the chemistry between them was immediate, he described the match as the perfect debut for Erin Jacobs and one that cemented his place within Fight Factory Wrestling:
“I think that they saw that I wasn’t really getting used that much, they wanted to give me the platform, and give me some usage. They gave me an opportunity and said, if you want, we could go for sort of an angle with Dutch. I was like, that’d be great, because I had already seen Dutch’s stuff, and I knew him for a couple of years at that point.
I was just really excited, because it’s a new person to work with that I knew his body of work, so I was really excited to work him and see how easy it would be, because that always means that you’ve got chemistry, so that’s usually what I’m looking for when I go work with somebody who’s got a lot of experience, and when it was pitched, it was pitched with the idea that I was just this ruthless aggressor against this hometown hero kind of thing, and the idea that I would just be like emotionless and going after him all the time.”
Although his debut match with FFW and those that followed were drama-free, a BWR match could have ended much worse for those involved.
While the Erin Jacobs character is a scary persona, one incident that took place was a lot more terrifying for a different reason. In what appeared to be a steel chair spot gone wrong, Joe feared that he had broken his opponent’s neck:
“So I ended up being a showstopper in all of the wrong ways. We’d had this title reign for quite a while in terms of tag matches, and we were against Rawk and Cole at the time, and I love working Scott [Rawk]; he’s just always so positive about everything, he’s always willing to do something and I’m thinking about his safety. That’s my most important thing, is other people’s safety.
But when it came to the end, we had this ending spot where Rory Coyle is going around the ring and I think we’d handcuffed Rob to the ropes or something like that, while I had a chair wrapped around Cole [Quinzel’s] head and I had my foot on on the chair, so that I was about to like stomp on the chair at some stage once Rory gave me the signal.”
Joe then recalled not being given the signal, so he had to improvise:
“Rory forgot that he was going to give me a signal, and I realised it’s not going to come. So then I do the stomp when I feel like the time is right, but when I put the chair over Cole’s head, I said, “Don’t move at all!’ Because you can’t in those situations; you just have to stay as still as possible to make it so the safety of it is right. So I stomp on the chair, I go to the back, and as I glimpse back, I see paramedics have gone around Cole. I think maybe they’re just overly panicking because of the way that the spot was, because it was very sort of dramatic the way that we’d done it.”
There were fears that Cole could have suffered a broken neck. But thankfully, major injuries were avoided:
“It turns out what had happened is that they thought he broke his collarbone, not his neck, so I was thankful about that. But once he’d actually got to the hospital, they found out that he hadn’t broken anything at all, and he was absolutely fine, which is absolutely great.
Nathan Cruz commended me backstage for that, and he came over to me, and he was saying, ‘Look, I spoke to Cole, I’ve seen the footage back, you did nothing wrong, you did exactly what you were supposed to do, it was called Cole moved, I saw him move just before you stmped down, it wasn’t that much contact, so I think he’s going to be fine.'”
Outside The Ring: Joe Rage On Mental Health & Awareness
Away from wrestling, Rage previously worked with vulnerable children before his current job of teaching apprenticeships. Although many kids are massive pro wrestling fans, Rage never met a fan during this time:
“It’s like I have a curse. I’ve never had a kid that actually enjoys wrestling in the entirety of like 10 or 11 years that I’ve worked with kids. My mates, who work in other houses, they have kids or have had kids that love wrestling. They tell me ‘Oh, you should have worked here, you would have got this kid and they’d have been out to wrestling shows with you…’ and stuff like that. Yeah, that’s usually how that story goes.”
One achievement away from wrestling that Rage is very proud of is becoming a qualified suicide first aider:
“That was something I was really proud of. I signed up for it, went on the course, and it was just really enlightening to find out how to deal with suicide, as people having those suicidal thoughts, because we deal with a lot of kids that have those thoughts, we deal with a lot of self-harm, we deal with a lot of kids who unfortunately, want to take their own life. So it’s dealing with that in the moment. The actual course is what do you do in that moment, because they’re saying that they want to end their life, so how do you steer the conversation? Because that’s all it is, is a conversation. We’re trying to get them past today to get to tomorrow, because tomorrow you might, after sleep, feel differently. So, if we can get you to sleep on it and let’s get to tomorrow. Then we’ll try and deal with tomorrow tomorrow.”
Along with helping others, Rage has openly spoken about his own mental struggles in prior interviews. With pro wrestling being an anxiety-inducing industry, Rage is trying to see it as a part in what he described as “aggressive panto”:
“I don’t think you can ever prepare for the amount of anxiety you’re gonna endure while being a wrestler. You’re worried about messages being left on read, whether spots are going to come accross right, whether your character is going to get any attention.
I’m coming up to 20 years now and I’m coming towards 40, so now is the time where indie wrestling is like a cut-off point for me to sort of go I don’t think I should be doing this any longer, but there are people around me that have done it for around the same time. But as long as it’s still fun, you should carry on doing this. I don’t know.
I think also, in my older age, realising that it’s just aggressive panto. At the end of the day, you’re just there for a casting part; you’re not there to be invested as much as what I get invested in sometimes in certain promotions and things. I think that helps, rather than belittle yourself, belittle the business. It’s just wrestling. It’s not the whole world. It shouldn’t be your whole life, but for some people it is. I can understand why, but at the same time, just belittle wrestling; don’t belittle yourself that way, you can deal with the pitfalls that come around the corner.”
Rage once again credited Rampage, who has been vital to his own career, for being there during those tougher times:
“The anxiety that comes of it, you have to do everything you can to offset it. You have to have good people around you. You have to have a good network of people to be able to vent to, because if you vent to somebody and do they just go, you know, you’re not getting acknowledged, you’re not getting like that kind of like confirmation or affirmation about what you’re actually going through at the time. So it’s good for me that I still like go about with Rampage, or I have like those kind of like wrestling connections still that I’ve always had from day one, so they understand my career and they understand what I’m going through. For me to be able to say x, y, and z is affecting me, and they go, yeah, but this, this, and this, it kind of calms me down a bit, and going, yeah, you’re right.”
Prior to the unpredictable and ever-changing world that is pro wrestling, Rage was part of an equally chaotic industry, as at one point he was a chef. Rounding out the interview with a fun anecdote, Rage explained why he was one of the friendliest drunks the Jersey police have ever had to deal with:
“There was a moment in it where I got sent off to Jersey in the Channel Islands. I was there for like about a year and there was this moment where I got massively drunk the night before. I ended up in prison because there they don’t take drunk and disorderly very lightly. Apparently, I was like the most polite drunk that they’ve ever had, because they picked me up in the middle of the road where I was lying down asleep, and all I asked for was, ‘Is there a bed where I’m going?’ They said yes. So I jumped into the back seat, then just stayed there. I couldn’t direct them to the hotel from where we were, so they just took me to a cell and just held me in there.
The next day, I’d spoken to them and stuff and they said, ‘Well, because you were so polite and because we actually enjoyed having you, there’ll be no charge.”
Rage added that shortly after the night in jail, he looked to take wrestling more seriously moving forward.
Whether fans know him as the traditional Joe Rage or the unsettling Erin Jacobs, the man behind both personas has learned that wrestling is only one part of who he is.
Follow Joe Rage on Instagram here.
Images taken by Tony Knox and edited by Gravelight Photography.
